In brief
- Pseudonymous crypto influencer The White Whale had his $3 million MEXC account suspended in July, and has been on a social media crusade to get it back ever since.
- On Friday, MEXC apologized, returned his funds, and promised to make changes to stop it from happening again in the future.
- However, several other users have reported similar issues as the exchange’s withdrawals have noticeably spiked since mid-July.
Centralized exchange MEXC has apologized for freezing the funds of a crypto whale for months, releasing his $3 million back to him and acknowledging that it handled the situation poorly.
Pseudonymous trader and crypto influencer The White Whale had his $3 million MEXC account suspended in July. The exchange told him that he had made two orders within the same second, which it said implied he wasn’t manually trading, had broken their terms of service, and the funds should be forfeited. However, he refused these claims.
The White Whale has since been on a social media campaign to get his funds back, with pseudonymous on-chain sleuth ZachXBT recently coming to his defense. Following a public back-and-forth between the trader and MEXC, the exchange caved.
“We fucked up. We apologize to The White Whale, and his money is already released. He can claim it at any time,” Cecilia Hsueh, CSO of MEXC, wrote on X. “I messed up in communicating with him. I got emotional, and I shouldn’t have.”
She added that following the incident, MEXC is working to create a “fast-track channel” to fix unresolved account issues. The White Whale claims to have been notified of hundreds of cases of other traders with “indefinite freezes with no access to their funds.”
“[It] took a while and a bunch of hate to get you to do it. 100% sure this tweet would not exist if he were someone with 100 followers,” pseudnymous trader Joji wrote on X.
“You’re not wrong,” Hsueh replied. “It takes a lot to wake up the whole company. We are working on making sure this doesn’t happen again.”
She explains part of the issue is the result of growing pains, scaling from a “very small exchange” to a top 10 exchange by volume. Hsueh said that MEXC’s “risk, operations, and PR teams” have not kept up with this growth.
“We’re going to change that,” Hsueh said. “I’ve been driving the leadership team to recognize the issues, identify changes we need to make, and improve on our transparency. After this, they’re now listening, and they all acknowledge that MEXC has to change.”
Meanwhile, CryptoQuant data shows that Bitcoin withdrawals on the exchange spiked from 40 per day to 1,237 daily in mid-July—around the time The White Whale’s funds were frozen. Withdrawals have remained high, processing 1,200 daily withdrawals on Thursday—and 1,450 on Friday as of 4 PM ET.
Users on social media are now reporting that they cannot withdraw funds from the exchange, while others claim they are in the same situation that The White Whale was in.
“I used to have millions on MEXC. And lately, I had the same exact issue and false allegations. I got it all solved after 14 days of waiting. Now I can’t trust it anymore,” crypto trader Elja wrote on X.
“MEXC was very nice with me when I onboarded hedge funds and institutional companies, then stopped being nice after they blocked all my [requests] for more than 365 days without explanation and without the possibility to interact with customer support to provide evidence or ask clarification,” another user replied.
MEXC did not respond to Decrypt’s request for comment regarding the high levels of Bitcoin withdrawals being recorded.
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